Common Mistakes and Misconceptions

Aug 8, 2019

As discussed in our previous blogs, there are multiple ways to go about doing direct mail campaigns, however, today we will be discussing some common errors, mistakes and misconceptions about direct mail campaigns and more.

Most of the common misconceptions about direct mail derive from the lack of knowledge about setting up a successful campaign, the data, the numbers, the templates and more. There are certain steps that need to be taken and a certain amount of knowledge possessed to receive a good response rate.

Some of the most common mistakes include spelling errors, spacing errors, and reoccurring or incorrect numbers. These can occur at any stage of the campaign, starting from the initial editing of your letter template to an issue occurring post merging.

If you are using a well–written template, you are less likely to have spelling mistakes, specifically when you double check all your additions and changes made to the template itself. The spacing errors can occur due to long lines of data being picked up and these could include long Legal Descriptions, Assessor Parcel Numbers etc. The spacing can sometimes add an extra page and move important information you may have to places that are not easily visible to your recipient. You can avoid this error by making sure all your information is on the same page(s) as when you first started setting it up and shortening some of this data in your data spreadsheet.

An extremely important thing to keep in mind is that the Assessor Parcel Numbers come in long and short combinations of numbers and letters, so identifying if there is a mistake or if it is the correct APN can be tricky but nothing that cannot be bypassed by simple performing a search.

The errors in numbers can occur in various places in your document but two of the most common areas this generally occurs is in the Acreage and the Offer Price. The reason for this error occurring sometimes in these specific places is due to the commas and the decimals that may exist in these numbers, that is why it is important to keep a sharp eye on these when verifying the information in your letters. In order to fix this, you can simply go back to your data sheet and check for what these columns of data are identified as and what they are set to round up to.

Thank you to Steven Butala and Jill DeWit for creating a company, where you can have a team working on your mailers and resolving these errors in a short amount of time so you can focus on the final goal of these campaigns, creating equity.

We will discuss more commonly occurring errors and misconceptions about direct mail campaigns in the upcoming blogs. This is Umar Awan for Offers2Owners, thank you for reading and I will catch you on the next one.